Fall of Pakistan ’71: ‘The sahibs are crying inside’

The end was as duplicitous as the beginning. When General Yahya Khan ordered his air force to strike India on the western front on 3 December 1971, he was only repeating history. He was taking whole leaves out of the books written earlier by Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Field Marshal Ayub Khan. In autumn 1947, Pakistan’s irascible founder had sent in Pakistani soldiers, camouflaged as tribals, into Kashmir. In 1965, the adventuristic Ayub Khan did a similar act. In both instances, there was disaster for Pakistan. All that was achieved was a loss of face. Jinnah’s ambitions prevented any chance of a plebiscite in Kashmir. Ayub’s overweening self-confidence made him eat humble pie in Tashkent.

Of course Yahya Khan did not despatch his soldiers in the guise of tribesmen to the western front with India. But that he hoped to pin the Indians down in the west, in the expectation that they would stop in their tracks to Dhaka in the company of the Mukti Bahini, was the thought that drove him in those final hours of a country on its way to losing its eastern half to Bengali nationalists. The desperation did not pay. And yet in those final days, the state of Pakistan played out a tragicomedy of its own making. Politics, never a serious proposition in the country, turned into a definitive farce in those December days.

Observe. On the very day that Yahya ordered those air strikes on Indian air bases, not knowing that Indira Gandhi had judiciously had her jet fighters relocated days earlier, he decreed a quasi-civilian government for Pakistan. He called it, in what was clearly a moment of dark comedy, a transfer of power to the elected representatives of the people. No, he was not giving up his job. No, he would not tell his country that the real elected representatives of the people were at that point well on their way to assuming charge of a new nation called Bangladesh, about to emerge from the ashes of East Pakistan. For him, the elected representatives were Nurul Amin, a leading Bengali collaborator of the army then trapped in (West) Pakistan, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the man whose refusal to play the role of leader of the opposition in the aborted national assembly had precipitated the crisis. Nurul Amin was named prime minister. Bhutto assumed the twin roles of deputy prime minister and foreign minister. He was swiftly sent off to New York to argue Pakistan’s case at the UN Security Council.

Away in Dhaka, Pakistan was coming apart. The centre was not being able to hold. General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi vowed to fight to the end. The Indians, he roared, would have to take Dhaka over his dead body. Only days later, Dhaka would be taken and Niazi would still be alive. But between the boast and the surrender, bucketfuls of tears would flow. Intercepted army radio conversations were revealing of the plight of soldiers who had over the preceding nine months bravely murdered Bengalis in the towns and villages and raped their women in the tens of thousands. These soldiers, dishevelled and bedraggled, were all on their way to Dhaka, having progressively lost the towns they had terrorised since March-April of the year. It was a terrible spectacle of a putatively disciplined army declining into the state of a ragtag band of demoralised, fearful men desperate to save themselves from the wrath of a nation they had humiliated for months.

Rao Farman Ali, the cool, sinister, calculative general who ticked off the names of the Bengalis to be abducted and killed, was suddenly a frightened man in December. Fright often gives way to last-ditch measures to secure one’s safety. For Farman Ali, it was a simple matter of ordering the al-Badr and al-Shams, the razakar goon squads the army had built as a bulwark against Bengali aspirations to freedom, to pick up and then pick off as many of the best of Bengali minds they could lay their hands on. The assassins lost not a moment in heeding the instructions. Over a period of three days between 13 and 15 December, even as Pakistan was gasping for breath in an ever-shrinking East Pakistan, they went on an orgy of murder. No fewer than a hundred and fifty leading Bengalis — journalists, academics, doctors, writers, poets — were murdered. The point was simple: Pakistan was dying, but let that not hamper the job of leaving a soon-to-be born Bangladesh intellectually crippled at birth.

At the United Nations, Pakistan’s friends went frantic with calls for a ceasefire, for good reason. On the one hand, they sought to prevent a collapse of West Pakistan, where Indian soldiers were making steady inroads. On the other, they were anxious about a political settlement being reached in East Pakistan. In the event, none of the measures worked, for two very good reasons. The first was the desire of the Indian army and the Mukti Bahini not to accept any ceasefire until Dhaka had been liberated. The second was the clear intention of the Soviet Union to veto every resolution calling for a ceasefire as long as the whole of Bangladesh did not stand liberated. Pakistan stood no chance, not even with US President Richard Nixon despatching the Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal, the palpable aim being to intimidate Delhi and Mujibnagar into calling a halt to their march.

Two days before Dhaka fell, Khan Abdus Sabur, the notoriously prominent collaborator of the Pakistan army, would tell the dwindling, frightened band of collaborationist Bengalis that a free Bangladesh would be an illegitimate child of India. He was blissfully unaware of the travails the quisling cabinet of Abdul Mutalib Malek was going through and, with it, the pains the leading officers of the Pakistan army were going through. The puppet governor, quite unaware of the ground realities relating to the war, had till that point of time been endlessly reassured by Niazi that Pakistan’s soldiers were having a field day vanquishing the enemy. But then came Rao Farman Ali’s communications with the UN representative in Dhaka, exchanges that clearly had the Pakistani officer ask for a ceasefire and guarantees of safety for his soldiers.

As an inebriated Yahya Khan, a thousand miles away in Rawalpindi, persisted in asking the army to fight on, Malek summoned Niazi for a full picture on the ground. The ‘tiger’, for that was how he wished to be known, broke down. It was then for Malek to comfort Niazi. Everyone in the room — officers, civilians, the governor’s staff — wept. And into that funereal scene stepped a Bengali servant at Governor’s House, with tea and biscuits for everyone. He was immediately howled out of the room. Once outside, he could not resist the temptation of telling his curious colleagues what he had just witnessed. ‘The sahibs are crying inside’, he whispered in a state of obvious glee.

Every one of the defenders of Pakistan — military officers, Bengali collaborators, civil and police officials despatched from (West) Pakistan to man the administration in occupied Bangladesh — was in a state of fear, indeed in tears. As Indian jets bombed the governor’s residence, Malek took refuge in an air raid shelter. On a thin piece of paper attached to the foil of a cigarette packet, he wrote out his resignation to be sent to Yahya Khan. And then he and all the puppet ministers, along with their Pakistani civilian officers, were lodged in the safe confines of the Intercontinental, which by then had been turned into a Red Cross neutral zone.

The skies over Dhaka were a free run for Indian jets and helicopters, for the Pakistan air force had been destroyed on the ground by the Indians within minutes of Yahya’s declaration of war. And from those helicopters now floated down tens of thousands of leaflets from General S.H.F.J. Manekshaw, instructing Pakistan’s army to surrender peacefully. On the move, the Mukti Bahini and the Indian army killed the miles on the road to Dhaka. At the United Nations, Bhutto screamed his heart out, promising a thousand-year war with India, refusing to acknowledge his country’s defeat at the hands of Bangladesh. He stormed out of the Security Council as a bemused audience watched.

The end came swiftly. On the afternoon of 16 December, Pakistan, in the person of A.A.K. Niazi, bit the dust in what had been its eastern province. As many as 93,000 soldiers of the Pakistan army, having turned into a marauding, rampaging band of murderers and rapists over the preceding nine months, capitulated at the Race Course.

And here is the irony. Born through blood and gore, with tens of thousands of Hindus and Muslims dying in the sinister shadow of the Muslim League’s spurious two-nation theory in 1947, Pakistan collapsed in Bangladesh, under the weight of the three million corpses of Bengalis it had put to death in 1971. That was comeuppance.

Source: bdnews24